Windows 8 Metro: The fall of windows or the best invention ever

BostonB

gonzovision wrote: »

No of course not.. I use VLC also. But not being able to watch something in the default player if another screen is clicked is ridiculous.

Not really an issue if you don't use those apps. I've been using W8 for about 6 months and not used any metro apps.

Fysh

Torqay wrote: »

Good post indeed, however, the situation was somewhat different in 05/06. Windows XP in its early stages was not by any stretch of imagination free of glitches (only with the launch of SP2 it has seen major improvements) and it was on the market for 5 years already. In the meantime, MS has ditched the promising Longhorn project (which had the potential for a very successful corporate OS) for something entirely different and it became apparent that businesses would have to wait at least another 2 or 3 years for a new operating system to mature. By then Windows 2000 would have been well past its sell-by date, hence the rather late move to Windows XP.

Microsoft has made it very clear, that there will never be such a delay again. Corporations will no longer have 3 years to monitor how a new Windows OS evolves.

What makes you think corporations want to be locked into a 3-year OS cycle? There's a reason that the extended support from Microsoft is limited to the business-type editions, and that said extended support is typically 10 years from launch of OS.

The kind of big corporates we're talking about here are not web-browsing and office productivity shops (even if selling them those products is a huge part of Microsoft's business). Engineering enterprises using Windows will be running CAD tools whose licences sell for six-figure sums, and have mind-bogglingly detailed (and expensive!) software validation processes that they have to go through (ie making sure that things like integer rounding within the OS itself works as they expect it to and won't lead to critical deviations when calculating dimensions for part designs that could eg cause a small but fatal problem in an engine turbine). Other such firms will depend on or be required to provide support for hardware that has an expected lifespan measured in decades. Medical technology firms will have a requirement of being able to not just run ancient software but to dependably control certain interface types in predictable ways so that they can provide support for the equipment they sell to hospitals (eg the med-tech wing of the Big Corporate I mentioned earlier were exempted from the XP upgrade project, because some aspect of the software & hardware they used to provide support for their MRI scanners couldn't be revalidated in XP so they remained on Win2k, where everything worked.

Moving to a shorter OS lifespan is fine for consumer OSs, but insisting on making both enterprise and consumer forks sticking to the same upgrade & release cycle is one of the dumber moves MS have made in the last few years, IMO, and one that is going to cost them in the longer term.

Torqay

Fysh wrote: »

What makes you think corporations want to be locked into a 3-year OS cycle?

Nothing.

I meant to say, they won't have the time if they'd really care for the "latest and greatest" stuff coming from Redmond.

Fysh wrote: »

The kind of big corporates we're talking about here are not web-browsing and office productivity shops (even if selling them those products is a huge part of Microsoft's business).

For a brief period, MS had split their line of operating system into corporate and consumer versions (NT/2000 and 95/98/ME), they merged again with Windows XP, not least because many users were furious over ME, they had much preferred something like Windows 2000, which despite the price became very popular outside the corporate world. Although there was Home and Professional (a similar line up to Windows 3.11 and 3.11 for Workgroups) the differences were not substantial.

I don't believe, MS is targeting the corporate market with Windows 8, the companies you mentioned could not care less for a tiled UI or an app store (the latter being a fashionable gimmick purely aiming at consumers).

dasdog

I was really cynical about the preview but I installed RTM and after a few one off config changes it's not such a bad experience.

Create a new toolbar pointing to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs* and you have a Start menu (except its called "Programs"). Logoff, Shutdown, Explorer etc shortcuts can be added to it, icons changed. Haven't figured out how to get run/search there though.

*Switch UAC off, show hidden files/folders will need to be done first

All my users client apps are working except some functionality of a legacy one which we are retiring that hasn't had dev since 2002. There seems to be a cross domain negotiate issue with some sites...we are on to MS about that.

Stay away from Metro element if you are using a PC. You don't need to look at the tiles and that other crap.

Win/SQL2012 is where the real fun starts.

stevenmu

Windows 7 has been a pretty big success on the corporate/enterprise desktop. A lot of organisations have gone to it and a lot more are planning it. The way these organisations plan their upgrades (many skip every 2nd version, many have a policy of moving to the previous version when the next comes out etc), it is unlikely that many would go to Windows 8 no matter how good an OS it is.

My guess would be that MS realised this, and took the opportunity to start the transition to NotMetro. Doing a complete transition to NotMetro and making the perfect OS for consumers and enterprise and tablets and desktops would be too big a task for a single release. So I think they decided to go part way with Windows 8, and do what they could for consumers and tablets. That's where they are losing big at the moment, and they aren't going to get much traction with corporate and desktop due to release/upgrade cycles anyway.

Then for Windows 9 they will have updated and refined the concept for corporate and desktop use.